Is William Gibson A Modern Day Oracle?
>> MIKE: Here’s an idea: William Gibson is a modern day oracle. theme If you’ve never read a William Gibson novel, first: What? Really? Are you sure you’re watching the right channel? And second they’re really, very good. William Gibson is a sci fi writer of incredible renown, awesomeness, and as it turns out, soothability. In Neuromancer he predicted the internet. And in Burning Chrome he coined word cyberspace. In Idoru he predicted Miku Hatsune and in Virtual Light the coming popularity of reality television. But William Gibson is in essence just an entertainer. He’s not an oracle. I mean, Apollo speak through him. We don’t pick up the newest Gibson novel and think, “OMG, I hope he says we’re gunna have flying cars next year because having a flying would be so sweet.” Come to think of it, we don’t really treat anybody like that anymore, as a kind of ernest to gerd fortune teller. Sure, we still read horoscopes, but we’ve kind of moved past fearing the end times or wanting predictions for the coming harvest. crowing The vague superstition we all sometimes engage in is a kind of cultural residue from the time when we were all really interested in casting bones and omens and stuff. Back in those days the world was incredibly difficult to understand. There was no Google to answer questions like, “Why does it rain?”, “Why is the sky blue?”, or “How does Zac Efron get his hair to look like that?”. And so the oracle provided a kind of utility, even if they said you were going to have a bad time, at least you knew it was coming. Which actually happened kind of a lot. The Oracle at Delphi, said to have direct communication with Apollo, let the Athenians know they they were going to be torn limb from limb by the Spartans. And that later Nero’s time as Emperor of Rome was short at best. Nostradamus, who was essentially a sixteenth century French/Italian inverse of Tony Robbins with a penchant for plagiarism, predicted plagues, floods, apocalyptic earthquakes and even the coming of the antichrist. And of course the Mayans. Their story’s a little complicated so we’re going to save them for another day so in their place please enjoy this picture of John Cusack. playing: In Your Eyes So but anyway, the reputations of these predictors aren’t exactly stellar. Astrology joke! You see it’s funny because stellar is a astrology thing that could, it means, never mind. Some careful reading reveals that a lot of the correct predictions are really just the result of clever or purposefully unclear wordplay. And Nostradamus wrote hundreds of predictions, ranging in effect from one person to the entire world. He was playing the odds. But was mostly bad at playing them. By comparison, modern sci fi writers have a much higher batting-uh, soothsaying average. For all the works penned by William Gibson, Vernor Vinge, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Neal Stephenson, Orson Scott Card, Arthur C. Clarke and the list goes on, there seems to a larger number of correct predictions than from the group of people who in the past actually called themselves oracles. Virtual reality, augmented reality, a jam-packed media ecosystem, nature in retreat from human growth, it’s all kind of there. And why might that be? Why such a high success rate? Sci Fi writers take on the deceptively complicated task of imagining a future which is connected to the present. Old school future lookers, especially if you take into account some of Nostradamus’s more creative techniques, spent a lot of time trying to pick future stuff out of thin air. When they were right, a lot of the time they were lucky or sufficiently vague or both. Kinda like fortune cookies. They were, in essence, starting at the present and imagining a future without consideration for the intervening space: from Point A to Point C. William Gibson, as a matter of comparison, has a particularly good knack for imagining a near future and then building a far future based on it from: from Point A to Point C by way of B. Which is not only why his books are great and interesting but why he’s someone we should probably listen to. whispering He sort of predicted SOPA and ACTA, too. So but who cares if William Gibson has predicted some things a couple times, the need for sage like characters has basically disappeared. Way, way back when things like hurricanes and earthquakes and disease were mystical events with very real consequences on your family and society and the planet. Not knowing their cause or source made them essentially magic and so we needed the oracle to help us understand them. Well, quote finger understand, not science understand. Today most of us aren’t responsible for the harvest and we understand where hurricanes and tsunamis come from but this doesn’t mean there aren’t still some things about the world that are incredibly hard to understand. Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law is, famously, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. If you showed your iPhone to someone from the nineteenth century they would probably burn you as a witch. have found a witch, may we burn her? YEAH!” Dare I say it is essentially magic? The cultural and societal implications of all of these mysterious, technological boxes is hard, if not impossible, for us to imagine until it’s already happened. It’s good in that case to have Mr. Gibson and his pals around to help us steer the ship and understand not only the future, but also the present. What do you guys think? What sci fi predictions are right around the corner. Let us know in the comments. And Nostradamus actually predicted that you would subscribe. Which means you probably won’t… YouTube comments about YouTube comments about YouTube comments, let’s see what you guys had to say about the cultural singularity. First of all there were some really great conversations on reddit’s Explain Like I’m Five subreddit and on RichardDawkins.net so we’ll put some links in the description so you can check those out. driftmaste and a bunch of other people point out that internet culture might actually be made for something called the attention economy, things like up votes, um, and karma and LOLs and whatever, uh, which is very true and very real, the attention economy is very interesting. We have a definitive answer, something that describes something that is Nic Cage-esque, it’s Cajun. James Carville would approve. skyswordsman points out that one of the integral parts of the cultural singularity is speed at which all of this stuff can be produced, which is very important especially if you’re making the comparison to movies which take forever. Insert reference to insertion of witty response. Jadraptor makes a really interesting comparison between the cultural singularity and bacteria culture. He breaks the metaphor a little bit but we forgive him, it’s really interesting. Dastweeper makes a point about something called the meme half life which is the amount of time that a piece internet culture stays popular and how that could lead to the homogenization of overall internet culture. I promise you, KingAmongNerds, I will be fine. Going bald is awesome. You don’t have to get haircuts as often, haircuts are cheaper and I don’t have to worry about what my hair does, it just, it just kinda does this. Huh, thanks for the recommendation, trextord1. I’ll check it out. theme Category:English Category:Complete